Such claims emerge from a burgeoning therapeutic industry whose lifeblood is the creation of new problems to which they claim to hold the answers. They sell their wares to cash strapped institutions at great cost. Spend now, they say, and reap rewards in the social ills we will prevent. Self-esteem, happiness, mindfulness and mental health promotion — by the time evidence emerges that expensive programmes don’t make good on their promises, no one’s left to take the blame. They have all moved on to the Next Big Thing™.

Ascertaining the true state of childhood mental ill-health is also difficult because what constitutes mental ill-health has expanded wildly over time. We are labelling formerly unproblematic experiences as illnesses requiring expert interventions and creating new ones. We tend to think of human experience as always the same, with language merely becoming better able to describe it. That is not the case. Labels and ways of being have a habit of growing into each other.

My three-year-old came from preschool recently telling me she was, ‘a bit stressed out lately.’ While heretical sounding in a culture deeply submerged in therapeutic orthodoxies, I don’t think my three-year-old, whose life mainly consists of playing, sleeping and eating, needs to know the word ‘stress’. Children do not need to be educated in all the ways they might become emotionally unwell. What children need — what we all need — is to become engrossed in projects that help us transcend our own narrow existence.